Due to the nature of free tickets, about half of the fans who reserve tickets do not use them. Additionally, about half of the fans we make tickets AVAILABLE to don't ever actually reserve them. Therefore, we need to accept many ticket requests in order to ensure that we are able to provide the audience that production has asked us to bring.
When fans decline their tickets close to the show taping, we continue down the waitlist approving tickets. However, because these approvals happen on relatively short notice, many of them do not get claimed, which means that we need to accept more ticket requests the closer it gets to the taping date. We continue processing tickets on the waitlist until typically about 24 hours before a taping.